Online advertising has advanced beyond an obscure theory and into an extremely viable advertising outlet. Advertisers are willing to invest huge amounts of financial resources in an attempt to reach consumers more effectively. Emerging techniques aim to target advertisements to specific interest groups of potential customers. For instance, content-based advertising analyzes the content of a webpage that a particular online user is interacting with and, based upon the content of the webpage, directs advertisements to the online user. Basically, when an online user visits a webpage, a content-based advertising system will extract key terms or phrases from the page and deliver relevant advertisements to the online user in real-time. As an example, a content-based advertising system may intend to direct sports utility vehicle (SUV) advertisements to users reading about SUVs. Wherever the term SUV exists within the content of a webpage, the content-based advertising system is able to deliver a targeted SUV advertisement to the online user.
Unfortunately, some webpages include sensitive content that traditional content-based advertising systems are ill-suited to account for, causing the advertising system to deliver relevant but undesired advertisements, adversely affecting an advertiser's campaign. More specifically, content-based advertising systems lack an effective sensitivity measure that will intercept advertisements where they may be inappropriate. An effective sensitivity measure may also allow for specifically directed advertising opportunities in some circumstances that have thus-far not been taken advantage of. For example, where an online user is reading a news article about a recall of a particular automaker's SUVs, content-based advertising systems might recognize the term SUV in the article and display an advertisement for the recalling automaker. It would be extremely valuable for an automaker to avoid such an embarrassingly inappropriate advertisement. A competitor automaker may also consider it quite valuable to direct one of its own advertisements to an online user reading such an article. The exemplary deficiencies of content-detection techniques are not limited to an automobile context. For instance, a beer or liquor manufacturer will likely not want to display an advertisement in an article discussing drunk driving. Similarly, many advertisers may wish to avoid display of advertisements altogether on a webpage appealing to prurient interest. Because of the lack of content sensitivity, however, advertisers miss various lucrative advertising opportunities and advertisers are subject to potentially embarrassing and counter-productive displays of their advertisements.